In Everything is Happening: Journey into a Painting (Granta), Michael Jacobs set out to unlock the secrets of Velázquez’s greatest picture: Las Meninas. The book, published in 2015, a year after the author’s death, will be read with pleasure by anyone who has enjoyed Jacobs’s travel writing or who has any interest in Spain and the Spanish.

Chris Stewart, former drummer with Genesis and former sheep shearer, has written four books chronicling rural life in the Alpujarras mountains, south of Granada, where he settled in 1988, opening with Driving Over Lemons. The latest, Last Days of the Bus Club (Sort Of Books), published in 2014 before he took a break from writing to concentrate on repairs and renovations at the farm, was a Radio 4 Book of the Week.

Jason Webster (author of Duende and Guerra!), is due to publish in August the fifth in his series of Valencia-set detective stories, A Body in Barcelona. The last, Blood Med (Vintage), was up to the minute on recession-hit Spain, with even Webster’s dope-smoking hero, Chief Inspector Max Cámara, threatened by the cuts.

Barcelona's Teatre GrecCredit:
ALAMY

An older Spain, the one carved in stone and documented in print by his travelling predecessors, is celebrated by the Telegraph’s Christopher Howse, who has followed his A Pilgrim in Spain with The Train in Spain: Ten great journeys through the interior (Bloomsbury).

If you haven’t yet seen the country through the eyes of Laurie Lee, start with the Penguin collection published to mark the centenary of his birth in 2014, Red Sky at Sunrise. It combines Cider with Rosie with two of his three Spanish books, As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning and A Moment of War; the third, A Rose for Winter, is available from Vintage Classics.

Other suggestions

Catching up

Speak the Culture: Spain (Thorogood) is a tapas menu of a primer, with bite-size chunks on everything from the prehistoric cave paintings of Altamira to the films of Pedro Almodóvar – by way, of course, of Don Quixote, that postmodern novel written 400 years ago by Miguel de Cervantes (Visual Editions, based in London, published a new edition, with an introduction by Ali Smith and photographs taken along Quixote’s route by Jacob Robinson, in 2015).

Brushing up

In Ghosts of Spain (Faber) Giles Tremlett sees a country break the "pact of forgetting" and try to come to terms with the legacy of the Civil War. If you know nothing of the Basques beyond the news-page shorthand "ETA" and "separatist", start with Mark Kurlansky's The Basque History of the World (Vintage). In Into the Arena: the World of the Spanish Bullfight by Alexander Fiske-Harrison (Profile), an Englishman is introduced – literally as well as metaphorically – to el toro.

The festival of San FerminCredit:
2015 Getty Images/Pablo Blazquez Dominguez

Winding down

In Barcelona, move from Gothic Quarter to Gothic ghost story with The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafón (Phoenix). In Andalusia, try The Wind from the East by Almudena Grandes (Phoenix), a subtle tale of starting over, set near Cadiz, in an area swept by a wind that is said to drive people mad. In The Seville Communion by Arturo Pérez-Reverte (Vintage), a troubleshooter from the Vatican investigates mysterious deaths in a church scheduled for demolition – and gets lost in the city of the title as often as most first-time tourists do. Guernica by Dave Boling (Picador) is a story of love and war in the Basque town bombed by Franco – told, convincingly, by an American.